John F. Kennedy

General Summary

People, Terms, and Events

John F. Kennedy was born in 1917, just as
the United States entered World War
I. By the time of JFK's birth, the U.S. had demonstrated an
undeniable interest in international affairs, and the fact that
U.S. intervention helped shaped the course of World War I cemented
the status of the U.S. as a world power. JFK's formative years
spanned the 1920s, a period of booming prosperity in the U.S. that
became known as the "Roaring Twenties." The economic boom came
to an abrupt end, however, with the
stock market crash of 1929. The subsequent economic
collapse was partially alleviated by President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's "New Deal;" in Europe, however, it led to the collapse
of Germany's democratic government, and the rise to power of Adolf
Hitler.

Under Hitler and his Nazi-run government, Germany gradually absorbed
its weaker neighbors, while Britain (where JFK's father, Joseph
Kennedy, Sr. was the American ambassador) and France attempted
to appease the Nazis rather than fight them. Eventually, however,
German aggression provoked World War II (1939-1945). The U.S.
was sucked into the conflict when Japan, Hitler's ally, bombed
the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. World
War II, in which JFK became a hero and his brother Joe Jr. was
killed, ended with Germany defeated, Europe prostrate, and the
United States and the Soviet Union as the world's two "superpowers."

The "hot war" of World War II soon gave way to the Cold
War, the decades-long duel between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for
global dominance. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, at the
beginning of his unprecedented fourth term in office, and Harry
Truman became president. He was reelected in 1948, and during
his second term, the U.S. became involved in the Korean
War (1950-1953), during which American troops helped
fend off an invasion of South Korea by Soviet-backed North Korea.
At home, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his investigations into
Communist infiltration of the State Department, the movie industry,
and various other domains of American life. While there were,
as recent Cold War scholarship has shown, many Soviet spies in
the U.S. during this period, McCarthy's paranoia-fueled crusade
led to an overzealous witch-hunt mentality that persisted until
his downfall in 1954.

By that point, former general Dwight Eisenhower had become president,
having defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 election.
Eisenhower's hands-off style and fatherly demeanor made him one
of America's most popular presidents, and he presided over an
era of prosperity at home and cautious dueling with the Soviet Union
abroad. But beneath the placid surface, the seeds of later turmoil
were being sown. The Civil
Rights Movement got under way in the 1950s, with
school integration and sit-ins to protest segregation all across
the South. By the end of Eisenhower's second term, meanwhile,
many Democrats accused the administration of having allowed U.S.
foreign policy to drift, while Soviet power increased.

Running for president in 1960 against Eisenhower's Vice-President,
Richard Nixon, JFK was able to exploit these fears and win the
election. With his ringing inaugural declarations that the U.S. would
"pay any price" and "bear any burden" in the struggle against
Soviet tyranny, JFK explicitly opened a new, more bellicose phase
of the Cold War, one that would culminate in the most dangerous
event of his presidency, the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the domestic
front, the rising tide of civil rights protest erupted in the early
years of his presidency, forcing him to send federal troops into a
number of southern states. Finally, a principal component of U.S.
Cold War policy–American involvement in the former French colony
of Vietnam–began to demand a larger share of political attention
and resources in the early 1960s, paving the way for full-fledged
military intervention in what came to be known as the Vietnam
War. JFK's presidency signaled the end of the tranquil
Eisenhower years and the turbulence of the 1960s that was waiting
in the wings.